Use of English

Use an before a silent H: an heir, an hour, an honest politician, an honorary consul; use a before an aspirated H: a hero, a hotel, a historian (but don't change a direct quote if the speaker says, for example, "an historic"). With abbreviations, be guided by pronunciation: an LSE student, a CERN student

Round brackets

Round brackets (also called parentheses) are mainly used to separate off information that isn’t essential to the meaning of the rest of the sentence. If you removed the bracketed material the sentence would still make perfectly good sense. For example:

General

Use normal punctuation in captions, except at the end - No full stop at the end of the caption.

Image captions are a maximum of 200 characters (including spaces), and must include a credit in the format "(Image: Name/Organization)" Note there is no full stop after the parentheses at the end of the caption.

Text

The image caption should be directly linked to the body text. So instead of:

Contractions such as “there’s” “they’re”, “didn’t”, “he’ll”, “she’d” do not automatically make a story more accessible. Contractions can appear annoyingly chatty, and can be imprecise too (“it’s” can stand for “it is” or “it has”) and so detract from clarity. If anything, contractions make a story harder to understand, especially if there are several of them in the same sentence.

Amounts quoted in sterling, US dollars and euros do not normally need to be converted. The only exception might be if you want readers to be able to make direct comparisons between countries: if that applies you should choose one as the standard.

Any other currency should be converted the first time it is mentioned to the equivalent in US dollars. There are a number of currency converters on the net: xe.com covers any currency you are likely to encounter.